[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[December 14, 2000]
[Pages 2697-2704]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom
December 14, 2000

    Thank you very much, Vice Chancellor Follett and Lady Follett, Chancellor 
Ramphal. Lord Skidelsky, thank you for your biography of Keynes. I wonder what 
Mr. Keynes would think of us paying down the national debt in America 
today. [Laughter]
    I would like to thank the president of the student union, Caitlin 
McKenzie, for welcoming me. And I am 
delighted to be here with all of you. But I'd like to specifically, if I 
might, acknowledge one more person in the audience, a good friend to 
Hillary and me, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Thank you, Stephen, for being here. We're delighted 
to--[inaudible].
    Tony and Cherie Blair and Hillary and Chelsea and I are pleased to be here. 
I thank the Prime Minister for his kind remarks. It is true that we have 
all enjoyed an unusual friendship between the two of us and our 
families. But it is also true that we have honored the deeper and more 
important friendship between the United States and Great Britain, one 
that I believe will endure through the ages and be strengthened through 
changes of party and from election to election.
    I wanted to have a moment before I left this country for the last 
time as President just to say a few words about a subject which, as the 
Prime Minister said, we have discussed a lot, that I believe will shape 
the lives of the young people in this audience perhaps more than any 
other, and that is the phenomenon of globalization.
    We have worked hard in our respective nations and in our 
multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization 
that we all call by the shorthand term, Third Way. Sometimes I think 
that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that 
has actual policy substance, but for us it's a very serious attempt to 
put a human face on the global economy and to direct the process of 
globalization in a way that benefits all people.
    The intensifying process of economic integration and political 
interdependence that we know as globalization is clearly tearing down 
barriers

[[Page 2698]]

and building new networks among nations, peoples, and cultures at an 
astonishing and historically unprecedented rate. It has been fueled by 
an explosion of technology that enables information, ideas, and money, 
people, products, and services to move within and across national 
borders at increasingly greater speeds and volumes.
    A particularly significant element of this process is the emergence 
of a global media village in which what happens anywhere is felt in a 
flash everywhere--from Coventry to Kansas to Cambodia. This process, I 
believe, is irreversible. In a single hour today, more people and goods 
move from continent to continent than moved in the entire 19th century.
    For most people in countries like ours, the United States and 
Britain, this is helping to create an almost unprecedented prosperity, 
and along with it, the change to meet some of the long-term challenges 
we face within our nations.
    I am profoundly grateful that when I leave office, we will still be 
in the longest economic expansion in our history, that all income levels 
have benefited, and that we are able to deal with some of our long-term 
challenges. And I have enjoyed immensely the progress of the United 
Kingdom, the economic progress--the low unemployment rate, the high 
growth rate, the increasing numbers of people moving off public 
assistance, and young people moving into universities.
    But I think it's important to point out that globalization need not 
benefit only the advanced nations. Indeed, in developing countries, too, 
it brings the promise but not the guarantee of a better future. More 
people have been lifted out of poverty the last few decades than at any 
time in history. Life expectancy in developing countries is up. Infant 
mortality is down. And according to the United Nations Human Development 
Index, which measures a decent standard of living, a good education, and 
a long and healthy life, the gap between rich and poor countries 
actually has declined since 1970. And yet, that is, by far, not the 
whole story. For, if you took another starting point or just one region 
of the world, or a set of governments that have had particular 
vulnerability to developments like the Asian financial crisis, for 
example, you could make a compelling case that from time to time, people 
in developing countries and whole countries themselves, if they get 
caught on the wrong side of a development like the Asian financial 
crisis, are actually worse off for quite a good while.
    And we begin the new century and a new millennium with half the 
world's people struggling to survive on less than $2 a day, nearly one 
billion living in chronic hunger. Almost a billion of the world's adults 
cannot read. Half the children in the poorest countries still are not in 
school. So, while some of us walk on the cutting edge of the new global 
economy, still, amazing numbers of people live on the bare razor's edge 
of survival.
    And these trends and other troubling ones are likely to be 
exacerbated by a rapidly growing population, expected to increase by 50 
percent by the middle of this century, with the increase concentrated 
almost entirely in nations that today, at least, are the least capable 
of coping with it. So the great question before us is not whether 
globalization will proceed, but how. And what is our responsibility in 
the developed world to try to shape this process so that it lifts people 
in all nations?
    First, let me say, I think we have both the ability and the 
responsibility to make a great deal of difference by promoting 
development and economic empowerment among the world's poor; by bringing 
solid public health systems, the latest medical advances, and good 
educational opportunities to them; by achieving sustainable development 
and breaking the iron link between economic growth, resource 
destruction, and greater pollution, which is driving global warming 
today; and by closing the digital divide.
    I might say, parenthetically, I believe there are national security 
and common security aspects to the whole globalization challenge that I 
really don't have time to go into today, so I'll just steer off the text 
and say what I think briefly, which is that as we open borders and we 
increase the freedom of movement of people, information, and ideas, this 
open society becomes more vulnerable to cross-national, multinational, 
organized forces of destruction: terrorists; weapons of mass 
destruction; the marriage of technology in these weapons, small-scale 
chemical and biological and maybe even nuclear weapons; narcotraffickers 
and organized criminals; and increasingly, all these people sort of 
working together in lines that are quite blurred.
    And so that's a whole separate set of questions. But today I prefer 
to focus on what we have to do to see that this process benefits people 
in all countries and at all levels of society.

[[Page 2699]]

    At the core of the national character of the British and the 
American people is the belief in the inherent dignity and equality of 
all humans. We know perfectly well today how children live and die in 
the poorest countries and how little it would take to make a difference 
in their lives. In a global information age, we can no longer have the 
excuse of ignorance. We can choose not to act, of course, but we can no 
longer choose not to know.
    With the cold war over, no overriding struggle for survival diverts 
us from aiding the survival of the hundreds of millions of people in the 
developing world struggling just to get by from day to day. Moreover, it 
is not only the right thing to do; it is plainly in our interest to do 
so.
    We have seen how abject poverty accelerates turmoil and conflict, 
how it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic and 
religious hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the open economic 
and social order upon which our future depends. Global poverty is a 
powder keg, ignitable by our indifference.
    Prime Minister Blair made the same point in 
introducing his government's White Paper on international development. 
Thankfully, he remains among the world's leaders in pressing the 
commonsense notion that the more we help the rest of the world, the 
better it will be for us. Every penny we spend on reducing worldwide 
poverty, improving literacy, wiping out disease will come back to us and 
our children a hundredfold.
    With the global Third Way approach that he and I and others have 
worked on, of more open markets, public investments by wealthy nations 
in education, health care, and the environment in developing countries, 
and improved governance in those countries themselves, we can develop a 
future in which prosperity is shared more widely and potential realized 
more fully in every corner of the globe.
    Today I want to briefly discuss our shared responsibility to meet 
these challenges, and the role of all of us, from the richest to the 
poorest nations to the multilateral institutions to the business and NGO 
and religious and civil society communities within and across our 
borders.
    First, let me say, I think it's quite important that we 
unapologetically reaffirm a conviction that open markets and rule-based 
trade are necessary proven engines of economic growth. I have just come 
from Ireland, where the openness of the economy has made that small 
country the fastest growing economy in Europe, indeed, for the last few 
years, in the entire industrialized world. From the early 1970's to the 
early 1990's, developing countries that chose growth through trade grew 
at least twice as fast as those who kept their doors closed and their 
tariffs high.
    Now what? If the wealthiest countries ended our agricultural 
subsidies, leveling the playing field for the world's farmers, that 
alone could increase the income of developing countries by $20 billion a 
year.
    Not as simple as it sounds. I come from a farming State, and I live 
in a country that basically has very low tariffs and protections on 
agriculture. But I see these beautiful fields in Great Britain; I have 
driven down the highways of France; I know there is a cultural, social 
value to the fabric that has developed here over the centuries. But we 
cannot avoid the fact that if we say we want these people to have a 
decent life, and we know this is something they could do for the global 
economy more cheaply than we, we have to ask ourselves what our relative 
responsibilities are and if there is some other way we can preserve the 
fabric of rural life here, the beauty of the fields, and the 
sustainability of the balanced society that is important for Great 
Britain, the United States, France, and every other country.
    The point I wanted to make is a larger one. This is just one thing 
we could do that would put $20 billion a year in income into developing 
countries. That's why I disagree with the antiglobalization protesters 
who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development 
by keeping their doors closed to trade. I think that is a recipe for 
continuing their poverty, not erasing it. More open markets would give 
the world's poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper.
    Now, I know that many people don't believe that. And I know that 
inequality, as I said, in the last few years has increased in many 
nations. But the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade 
but, instead, to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on 
trade. That's easy for me to say--you can see how successful I was in 
Seattle in doing that. [Laughter]
    But let me say to all of you, in the last 2 years we not only had 
this WTO ministerial in Seattle--I went to Switzerland three times

[[Page 2700]]

to speak to the WTO, the International Labor Organization, and the World 
Economic Forum at Davos, all in an attempt to hammer out what the basic 
elements of a new consensus on trade, and in a larger sense, on putting 
a human face on the global economy would be.
    We do have to answer those who fear that the burden of open markets 
will fall mainly on them. Whether they're farmers in Europe or textile 
workers in America, these concerns fuel powerful political resistance to 
the idea of open trade in the developed countries.
    We have to do better in making the case not just on how exports 
create jobs but on how imports are good, because of the competition they 
provide; because they increase innovation and they provide savings for 
hard-pressed working families throughout the world. And we must do more 
to improve education and job training so that more people have the 
skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly.
    We must also ask developing countries to be less resistant to 
concerns for human rights, labor, and the environment so that spirited 
economic competition does not become a race to the bottom. At the same 
time, we must make sure that when we say we're concerned about labor and 
the environment and human rights in the context of trade, it is not a 
pretext for protectionism.
    Both the United States and Europe must do more to build a consensus 
for trade. In America, for example, we devote far, far too little of our 
wealth to development assistance. But on a per capita basis, we also 
spend nearly 40 percent more than Europeans on imports from developing 
countries. Recently, we passed landmark trade agreements with Africa and 
the Caribbean Basin that will make a real difference to those regions. 
If America matched Europe's generosity in development assistance and 
Europe matched our openness in buying products from the developing 
nations, think how much growth and opportunity we could spur.
    At the same time, I think it's important that we acknowledge that 
trade alone cannot lift nations from poverty. Many of the poorest 
developing countries are crippled by the burden of crushing debt, 
draining resources that could be used to meet the most basic human 
needs, from clean water to schools to shelter. For too long, the 
developed world was divided between those who felt any debt forgiveness 
would hurt the creditworthiness of developing nations and those who 
demanded outright cancellation of the debt with no conditions.
    Last year, at the G-7 Summit in Cologne, we--Prime Minister 
Blair and I and our colleagues--began to build a 
new consensus responding to a remarkable coalition, asking for debt 
relief for the poorest nations in this millennial year.
    We have embraced the global social contract: debt relief for reform. 
We pledged enhanced debt relief to poor countries that put forward plans 
to spend their savings where they ought to be spent, on reducing 
poverty, developing health systems, improving educational access and 
quality. This can make a dramatic difference.
    For example, Uganda has used its savings, already, to double primary 
school enrollment, a direct consequence of debt relief. Bolivia will now 
use $77 million on health and education. Honduras will offer its 
children 9 years of schooling instead of 6, a 50 percent increase.
    The developed world must build on these efforts, as we did in the 
United States when we asked for 100 percent bilateral debt relief for 
the least developed nations. And we must include more and more nations 
in this initiative. But we should not do it by lowering our standards. 
Instead, we should help more nations to qualify for the list--that is, 
to come forward with plans to spend the savings on their people and 
their future. This starts with good governance--something that I think 
has been overlooked.
    No matter how much we wish to do for the developing world, they need 
to have the capacity to absorb aid, to absorb assistance, and to do more 
for themselves. Democracy is not just about elections, even when they 
seem to go on forever. [Laughter] Democracy is also about what happens 
after the election. It's about the capacity to run clean government and 
root out corruption, to open the budget process, to show people an 
honest accounting of where their resources are being spent, and to give 
potential investors an honest accounting of what the risks and rewards 
might be. We have a moral obligation both to provide debt relief and to 
make sure these resources reach people who need them most.
    The poorer these people are, of course, the less healthy they're 
likely to be. That brings me to the next point. The obstacles to good 
health in the developing world are many and of great magnitude. There is 
the obvious fact

[[Page 2701]]

of malnutrition, the fact that so many women still lack access to family 
planning and basic health services. Around the world today, one woman 
dies every minute from complications due to childbirth.
    There is the fact that 1\1/2\ billion people lack access to safe, 
clean drinking water; and the growing danger of a changing climate, 
about which I will say more in a moment. But let me just mention the 
health aspects.
    If temperatures keep rising, developing countries in tropical 
regions will be hurt the most, as disease spreads and crops are 
devastated. Already, we see in some African countries malaria occurring 
at higher altitudes than ever before because of climate change.
    Today, infectious diseases are responsible for one in four deaths 
around the world--diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, diarrheal 
diseases. Just malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea kill 8 million people 
a year under the age of 15. Already, in South Africa, Botswana, and 
Zimbabwe, half of all the 15-year-olds are expected to die of AIDS. In 
just a few years, there will be three to six African countries where 
there will be more people in their sixties than in their thirties. This 
is a staggering human cost. Parenthetically, the economic toll is also 
breathtaking.
    AIDS is predicted to cut the GDP of some African countries by 20 
percent within 10 years. It is an epidemic with no natural boundary. 
Indeed, the fastest growing rate of infection today is in Russia and the 
nations of the former Soviet Union. Why makes the point of what we 
should do. In no small measure because those nations, in the aftermath 
of the end of communism, and actually beginning a few years before, have 
seen a steady erosion in the capacity of their public health systems to 
do the basic work that must be done.
    We must attack AIDS, of course, within our countries--in the United 
States and Britain. But we must also do all we can to stop the disease 
from spreading in places like Russia and India, where the rates of 
growth are large, but the overall numbers of infected people are still 
relatively small. But we must not also forget that the number one health 
crisis in the world today remains AIDS in Africa. We must do more in 
prevention, care, medications, and the earliest possible development of 
an affordable vaccine.
    The developing countries themselves hold a critical part of the 
answer. However limited their resources, they must make treatment and 
prevention a priority. Whatever their cultural beliefs, they must be 
honest about the ways AIDS spreads and how it can be prevented. Talking 
about AIDS may be difficult in some cultures, but its far easier to tell 
children the facts of life in any culture than to watch them learn the 
fact of death.
    In China, a country with enough resources to teach all its children 
to read, only 4 percent of the adults know how AIDS is transmitted. 
Uganda, on the other hand, has cut the rate of infection by half. So 
there are a lot of things that the developing world will have to do for 
itself. This, too, is in no small measure an issue of governance and 
leadership. But the bulk of the new investment will have to come from 
the developed world.
    In the last few years, our two nations have gotten off to a very 
good start. And yet the difference between what the world provides and 
what the world needs for treatment and prevention of AIDS, malaria, and 
TB is $6 billion a year. Now that may seem like a great deal of money, 
but think about this: Take America's fair share of closing that gap, 
$1.5 billion. That is about the same as our Government spends every year 
on office supplies, or about what the people of Britain spend every year 
on blue jeans.
    So I hope that some way will be found for the United States and its 
allies to close that $6 billion gap. It will be a very good investment, 
indeed. And the economic and social consequences to our friends in 
Africa and to other places where the rates of growth is even greater 
will be quite profound unless we do.
    The government alone cannot meet the health needs, but thus far, 
neither has the market. What is the problem? There is a huge demand for 
an AIDS vaccine, but the problem is, as all the economists here will 
readily understand, the demand is among people who have no money to pay 
for it. Therefore, the companies that could be developing the vaccines 
have virtually no incentive to put in the massive amounts of research 
money necessary to do the job. Only 10 percent--listen to this--10 
percent of all biomedical research is devoted to diseases that 
overwhelmingly affect the poorest countries.
    Now, we have sharply increased our investment in vaccine research, 
boosted funding for buying vaccines so that companies know there will be 
a guaranteed market not just for AIDS

[[Page 2702]]

but for other infectious diseases, proposed a tax credit to help provide 
for future vaccines to encourage more companies to invest in trying to 
find vaccines where there are none presently.
    I think we should expand that approach to the development of drugs 
and keep pressing pharmaceutical companies to make lifesaving treatments 
affordable to all. But we can't ask them to go broke; we're going to 
have to pay them to do it--directly or indirectly through tax credits.
    One of the best health programs, the best economic development 
programs and the best antipoverty strategies, as the vice chancellor 
said very early on today, is a good education. Each additional year 
spent in school increases wages by 10 to 20 percent in the developing 
world. A primary education boosts the farmers' output by about 8 
percent. And the education of girls is especially critical. Studies show 
that literate girls have significantly smaller and healthier families. I 
want to say just parenthetically here, I'm very grateful for the work 
that my wife has done over the last 8 years around the world to try to 
help protect young women and girls, get them in school, keep them in 
school. And I hope that we will do more on that. That can make a huge 
difference. And there are still cultures where there is dramatically 
disparate treatment between girls and boys and whether they go to school 
and whether they can stay. If all children on every continent had the 
tools to fulfill their God-given potential, the prospect for peace, 
prosperity, and freedom in the developing world would be far greater.
    We are making progress. In the past decade, primary enrollments have 
increased at twice the rate--twice the rate--of the 1980's. Still, more 
than 100 million kids get no schooling at all; 60 percent of them are 
girls. Almost half of all African children and a quarter of those in 
south and west Asia are being denied this fundamental right.
    Just this year 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic 
education to every child, girls and boys alike, in every country by 
2015. Few of our other efforts will be successful if we fail to reach 
this goal. What it will take is now known to us all. It's going to take 
a commitment by the developing countries to propose specific strategies 
and realistic budgets, to get their kids out of the fields and 
factories, to remove the fees and other obstacles that keep them out of 
the classroom. And it's going to take an effort by the wealthier 
countries to invest in things that are working.
    I hope a promising example is something that we in the United States 
started in the last year, a $300 million global school lunch initiative, 
using a nutritious meal as an incentive for parents to send their 
children to school. I am very hopeful that this will increase 
enrollment, and I believe it will. And I want to thank the U.K. and 
other countries that are willing to contribute to and support this.
    But the main point I want to make is, we can't expect to get all 
these children in the developing world into schools unless we're willing 
to help pay. I've been to schools in Africa that have maps that don't 
have 70 countries that exist today on them. And yet, we know that if 
they just had one good computer with one good printer, and someone paid 
for the proper connections, they could get all the information they need 
in the poorest places in the world to provide good primary education. 
Should we pay for it? I think it would be a good investment.
    Let me say just a few words about the digital divide. Today, south 
Asia is 700 times less likely to have access to the Internet than 
America. It's estimated that in 2010, in the Asia-Pacific region, the 
top 8 economies will have 72 percent of their people on line, but the 
bottom 11 will have less than 4 percent. If that happens, the global 
economy really will resemble a worldwide web, a bunch of interlocking 
strands with huge holes in between.
    It's fair to ask, I suppose, are computers really an answer for 
people who are starving or can't yet read? Is E-commerce an answer for 
villages that don't even have electricity? Of course, I wouldn't say 
that. We have to begin with the basics. But there should not be a choice 
between Pentium and penicillin. That's another one of those false 
choices Prime Minister Blair and I have been 
trying to throw into the waste bin of history.
    We should not patronize poor people by saying they don't need 21st 
century tools and skills. Microcredit loans in Bangladesh by the Grameen 
Bank to poor village women to buy cell phones has proved out to be one 
of the most important economic initiatives in one of the poorest 
countries in the world.
    I went to a village co-op in Nayla, Rajasthan, India, last year, 
last March, and I was astonished to see the women's milk co-op doing all 
of its

[[Page 2703]]

billing on computers and marketing on computers. And I saw another 
computer there that had all the information from the federal and state 
government, with a wonderful printer, so that all the village women, no 
matter how poor, could come in. And one woman came in with a 2-week-old 
baby and printed out all the information about what she ought to do with 
the baby for the next 6 months.
    So I think it's a copout to say that technology cannot be of immense 
help to very poor people in remote places. If it's done right, it may be 
of more help to them than to people who are nearer centers of more 
traditional, economic and educational and health opportunity.
    So from my point of view, we have to begin to have more places like 
those poor villages in India, like the cell phone businesses in 
Bangladesh, like the city of Hyderabad in India, now being called 
``Cyberabad.'' Developing countries have to do their part here, too. 
They have to have laws and regulations that permit the greatest possible 
access at the lowest possible cost. And in the developed world, 
governments have to work with corporations and NGO's to provide 
equipment and expertise. That's the goal of the digital opportunity task 
force, which the G-8 has embraced, and I hope we will continue to do 
that.
    Let me just say one word about climate change. If you follow this 
issue, you know we had a fairly contentious meeting recently about 
climate change, with no resolution about how to implement the Kyoto 
agreement, which calls for the advanced nations to set targets and for 
some mechanisms to be devised for the developing nations to participate. 
There are lots of controversies about to what extent countries should be 
able to get credit for sinks. Trees--do the trees have to be planted? 
Can they already be up? To what extent the developing countries should 
agree to follow a path of development that is different from the one 
that we followed in the United States and the United Kingdom. I don't 
want to get into all that now, except to say there will be domestic and 
regional politics everywhere. But let's look at the facts.
    The facts are that the last decade was the hottest decade in 1,000 
years. If the temperature of the Earth continues to warm at this rate, 
it is unsustainable. Within something like 50 years, in the United 
States, the Florida Everglades and the sugarcane fields in Louisiana 
will be under water. Agricultural production will have to be moved north 
in many places. And the world will be a very different place. There will 
be more extreme weather events. There will be more people displaced. It 
will become virtually impossible in some places to have a sustainable 
economy. This is a big deal.
    And the only thing I would like to say is that I do not believe that 
we will ever succeed unless we convince people--the interest groups in 
places like the United States which have been resistant and the driving 
political forces in countries like India and China who don't want to 
think that we're using targets in climate change to keep them poor--we 
have to convince them that you can break the link between growing wealth 
and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There is ample 
evidence that this is true, and new discoveries just on the horizon 
which will make it more true.
    But it is shocking to me how few people in responsible positions in 
the public and private sector even know what the present realities are 
in terms of the relationship in energy use and economic growth. So I 
think one of the most important things that the developed world ought to 
be doing is not only making sure we're doing a better job on our own 
business--which is something the United States has to do--not only doing 
more in emissions trading so that we can get more technology out into 
the developed world but making sure people know that this actually 
works.
    An enormous majority of the decisionmakers in the developed and the 
developing world still don't believe that a country can grow rich and 
stay rich unless it puts more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every 
year. It is not true. And so this is one area where we can make a big 
contribution to sustainable development and to creating economic 
opportunities in developing countries, if we can just get people in 
positions of influence to get rid of a big idea that is no longer true.
    Was it Victor Hugo who said, ``There's nothing more powerful than an 
idea whose time has come''? The reverse is also true: There's no bigger 
curse than a big idea that hangs on after its time has gone. And so, I 
hope all of you will think about that.
    Finally, let me just say that no generation has ever had the 
opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that 
leaves no one behind and, in the process, to create a new century of 
peace and prosperity in a world

[[Page 2704]]

that is more constructively and truly interdependent. It is a wonderful 
opportunity. It is also a profound responsibility. For 8 years, I have 
done what I could to lead my country down that path. I think for the 
rest of our lives, we had all better stay on it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:08 p.m. in Butterworth Hall at the 
University of Warwick Arts Center. In his remarks, he referred to Sir 
Brian Follett, vice chancellor, Sir Shridath Ramphal, chancellor, and 
Lord Robert Skidelsky, professor of economics, University of Warwick; 
Sir Follett's wife, Lady Deb Follett; and Prime Minister Tony Blair of 
the United Kingdom and his wife, Cherie.